We are living in a fast-paced world, where new ideas — communicated far and wide by social media and internet — are taking hold faster than ever. Which is good news for construction, traditionally an “oil tanker” industry where it took years for innovations adopted at the top end to work their way down through extended supply chains. The industry is hardly in resilient shape at the beginning of 2013, but at least the potential to take up new ideas more quickly could prove positive.
Take the HSE’s new stance on CDM and health and safety accreditation. The regs were last updated in 2007, a move which spawned a mini-industry of “competency” testing and certification. Now the HSE is calling for consolidation and mutual recognition between schemes. The sooner that message gets through the better: site managers will welcome the day when operatives arrive on site with a single card rather than a sheaf of certificates.
Or how about the 100 new fast-track, flexible homes due to be built on council-owned gap sites in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. After so many false dawns for Modern Methods of Construction in house-building, this is a breakthrough. It’s come about through the council actually having money to invest thanks to the recently reformed Housing Revenue Account, aspirational design that appeals to middle income buyers, and a modular system that doesn’t require bulky lorry loads with expensive police escorts. Again, the sooner other councils hear about Rational House — and similar approaches that have been proposed — the better it will be for housing diversity and our dire statistics on housing output.
Then there’s the reforms being ushered in by the RIBA Plan of Work 2013. 50 years of construction convention are being swept away, and about time too. It’s clearly unworkable to try to weld new approaches to project delivery to production processes linked to traditional contracts. There are predictions that confusion could set in, but let’s hope that the transparency of the information age shrinks the problem away.
Finally, there’s the range of ideas and projects being championed by “The Modernisers”, our group of young professionals working to make a difference to construction in 2013. Championing BIM, ideas capture, online health and safety, biodiversity and inclusion, they’ve chosen to direct their energy towards wider industry agendas at a time when many of their peers focus on building their careers.
Of course, the fact that these young people have been noticed by directors and decision makers is because today’s industry is more open, diverse and meritocratic than it was, and construction has become a place where good ideas communicated well will be acted on. In a year that kicks off with universally gloomy economic predictions, it’s another reason why we can feel positive about 2013.
